Two thousand year old message from Buduica of incredible relevance to contemporary slaves

24th January 2011

“Let us do our duty while the memory of freedom still abides within
us, that we may leave both the name and the fact of it to our
children. For if we utterly lose sight of the happy conditions amid
which we were born and bred, what pray will they do, reared in
bondage? . . . Let us show them that they are hares and foxes trying
to rule dogs and wolves.”  Buduica on the plains of Northumbria, AD 61 (quoted by Cassius Dio)

for Patty Blackwell and Barbara Hand Clow

These are the two thousand year old words of a Roman writer who seems
remarkably like ourselves, an ordinary citizen brought up by decent
parents who cared about honesty, compassion and the nation to which he
was loyal. By comparison, the ups and downs of his life and times were
far more violent than ours. Emperors were liable to be sliced up as
they sat on their thrones, yet for most of the nine century run of the
Roman Empire, life was good and happy, although a capricious justice
that was inevitably sabotaged by corruption gradually dragged
civilization into what are now known as the Dark Ages.

Cassius Dio witnessed many of the events he wrote about in person.
This is the story he wrote about an enemy. Even so, the admiration he
conveys comes down through time as an astonishing homáge to a
miraculous foe.

This is the story of Nero, the Roman emperor who set his own city on
fire, and of his trusted adviser, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, whose
reputation survived his own corruption, and the greatest heroine of
them all, Buduica, archetype of the Celtic warrior goddess, the
sword-wielding blonde bombshell who scared the Romans out of their
wits, exactly as written by this high integrity historian of ancient
times.

Previewing the punchline, it should be noted than anyone making the
connection between the role of these ancient Romans and that of our
present day Jews should be forgiven if Buduica’s descriptions hit too
close to home, because our present day conditions mirror so much the
conditions of oppressed Britain under constant assault by the Roman
war machine.

Thus, I believe this to be an uncannily accurate forecast of what is
about to happen in the United States of America in the year AD 2011,
which is 1950 years after the recording of the following requiem to
freedom.

The story of Buduica by Cassius Dio, 61 AD.

. . . a terrible disaster had taken place in Britain.

Two cities had been sacked, eight myriads of Romans and of their
allies had perished, and the island had been lost.

Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon them by a woman, a fact which
in itself caused them the greatest shame.

Heaven evidently gave them in advance an indication of the
catastrophe. At night there was heard to issue from the senate-house
foreign jargon mingled with laughter and from the theatre outcries
with wailing: yet no mortal man had uttered the speeches or the
groans. Houses under water came to view in the river Thames, and the
ocean between the island and Gaul sometimes grew bloody at flood-tide.

The casus belli lay in the confiscation of the money which Claudius
had given to the foremost Britons — Decianus Catus, governor of the
island — announcing that this must now be sent back. This was one
reason.

Another was that Seneca had lent them on excellent terms as regards
interest a thousand myriads that they did not want, and had afterward
called in this loan all at once and levied on them for it with
severity.

[Sound familiar?]

But the person who most stirred their spirits and persuaded them to
fight the Romans, who was deemed worthy to stand at their head and to
have the conduct of the entire war, was a British woman, Buduica, of
the royal family and possessed of greater judgment than often belongs
to women.

It was she who gathered the army to the number of nearly twelve
myriads and ascended a tribunal of marshy soil made after the Roman
fashion.

In person she was very tall, with a most sturdy figure and a piercing
glance; her voice was harsh; a great mass of yellow hair fell below
her waist and a large golden necklace clasped her throat; wound about
her was a tunic of every conceivable color and over it a thick chlamys
had been fastened with a brooch. This was her constant attire. She now
grasped a spear to aid her in terrifying all beholders and spoke as
follows:

"You have had actual experience of the difference between freedom and
slavery. Hence, though some of you previously through ignorance of
which was better may have been deceived by the alluring announcements
of the Romans, yet now that you have tried both you have learned how
great a mistake you made by preferring a self-imposed despotism to
your ancestral mode of life.

“You have come to recognize how far superior is the poverty of
independence to wealth in servitude.

“What treatment have we met with that is not most outrageous, that is
not most grievous, ever since these men insinuated themselves into
Britain?

“Have we not been deprived of our most numerous and our greatest
possessions entire, while for what remains we must pay taxes?

“Besides pasturing and tilling all the various regions for them do we
not contribute a yearly sum for our very bodies?

“How much better it would have been to be sold to masters once and for
all than to ransom ourselves annually and possess empty names of
freedom!

“How much better to have been slain and perish rather than go about
with subservient heads! Yet what have I said? Even dying is not free
from expense among them, and you know what fees we deposit on behalf
of the dead.

“Throughout the rest of mankind death frees even those who are in
slavery; only in the case of the Romans do the very dead live for
their profit.

“Why is it that though none of us has any money, and how or whence
should we get it?

“We are stripped and despoiled like a murderer's victims? How should
the Romans grow milder in process of time, when they have conducted
themselves so toward us at the very start — a period when all men show
consideration for even newly captured beasts?

"But, to tell the truth, it is we who have made ourselves responsible
for all these evils in allowing them so much as to set foot on the
island in the first place instead of expelling them at once as we did
their famous Julius Caesar, — yes, in not making the idea of
attempting the voyage formidable to them, while they were as yet far
off, as it was to Augustus and to Gaius Caligula.

“So great an island, or rather in one sense a continent encircled by
water, do we inhabit, a veritable world of our own, and so far are we
separated by the ocean from all the rest of mankind that we have been
believed to dwell on a different earth and under a different sky and
some of their wisest men were not previously sure of even our exact
name.

“Yet for all this we have been scorned and trampled under foot by men
who know naught else than how to secure gain.

“Still, let us even at this late day, if not before, fellow-citizens,
friends and relatives, — for I deem you all relatives, in that you
inhabit a single island and are called by one common name.

“Let us do our duty while the memory of freedom still abides within
us, that we may leave both the name and the fact of it to our
children. For if we utterly lose sight of the happy conditions amid
which we were born and bred, what pray will they do, reared in
bondage?

"This I say not to inspire you with a hatred of present
circumstances, — that hatred is already apparent — nor with a fear of
the future — that fear you already have — but to commend you because
of your own accord you choose to do just what you ought, and to thank
you for cooperating so readily with me and your own selves at once.

“Be nowise afraid of the Romans.

“They are not more numerous than are we nor yet braver.

“And the proof is that they have protected themselves with helmets and
breastplates and greaves and furthermore have equipped their camps
with palisades and walls and ditches to make sure that they shall
suffer no harm by any hostile assault.

“Their fears impel them to choose this method rather than engage in
any active work like us.

“We enjoy such a superabundance of bravery that we regard tents as
safer than walls and our shields as affording greater protection than
their whole suits of mail.

“As a consequence, we when victorious can capture them and when
overcome by force can elude them.

“And should we ever choose to retreat, we can conceal ourselves in
swamps and mountains so inaccessible that we can be neither found nor
taken.

“The enemy, however, can neither pursue any one by reason of their
heavy armor nor yet flee.

“And if they ever should slip away from us, taking refuge in certain
designated spots, there, too, they are sure to be enclosed as in a
trap.

“These are some of the respects in which they are vastly inferior to
us, and others are their inability to bear up under hunger, thirst,
cold, or heat, as we can; for they require shade and protection, they
require kneaded bread and wine and oil, and if the supply of any of
these things fails them they simply perish.

“For us, on the other hand, any root or grass serves as bread, any
plant juice as olive oil, any water as wine, any tree as a house.
Indeed, this very region is to us an acquaintance and ally, but to
them unknown and hostile.

“As for the rivers, we swim them naked, but they even with boats can
not cross easily. Let us therefore go against them trusting boldly to
good fortune. Let us show them that they are hares and foxes trying to
rule dogs and wolves."

At these words, employing a species of divination, she let a hare
escape from her bosom, and as it ran in what they considered a lucky
direction, the whole multitude shouted with pleasure, and Buduica
raising her hand to heaven, spoke:

"I thank thee, Andraste, and call upon thee, who are a woman, being
myself also a woman that rules not burden-bearing Egyptians like
Nitocris, nor merchant Assyrians like Semiramis (of these things we
have heard from the Romans), nor even the Romans themselves, as did
Messalina first and later Agrippina.

“At present their chief is Nero, in name a man, in fact a woman, as is
shown by his singing, his playing the cithara, his adorning himself.

“But ruling as I do men of Britain that know not how to till the soil
or ply a trade yet are thoroughly versed in the arts of war and hold
all things common, even children and wives; wherefore the latter
possess the same valor as the males: being therefore queen of such men
and such women I supplicate and pray thee for victory and salvation
and liberty against men insolent, unjust, insatiable, impious.

“If, indeed we ought to term those creatures men who wash in warm
water, eat artificial dainties, drink unmixed wine, anoint themselves
with myrrh, sleep on soft couches with boys for bedfellows (and past
their prime at that), are slaves to a zither-player, yes, an inferior
zither-player.

“Wherefore may this Domitia-Nero woman [Domitia was Nero’s wife] reign
no more over you or over me: let the wench sing and play the despot
over the Romans. They surely deserve to be in slavery to such a being
whose tyranny they have patiently borne already this long time. But
may we, mistress, ever look to thee alone as our head."

After an harangue of this general nature Buduica led her army against
the Romans. The latter chanced to be without a leader for the reason
that Paulinus their commander had gone on an expedition to Mona, an
island near Britain. This enabled her to sack and plunder two Roman
cities, and, as I said, she wrought indescribable slaughter.

Persons captured by the Britons underwent every form of most frightful
treatment. The conquerors committed the most atrocious and bestial
outrages.

For instance, they hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished
women, cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, to make
the victims appear to be eating them. After that they impaled them on
sharp skewers run perpendicularly the whole length of the body.

All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and
exhibitions of insolence in all of their sacred places, but chiefly in
the grove of Andate, — that being the name of their personification of
Victory, to whom they paid the most excessive reverence.

[But the tide of history turned against Buduica. Armor and tactics
proved too powerful for the primitive Britons. As ancient Egypt had
finally been overrun by horses and chariots and bronze, so ancient
England was trammeled by the mechanized modern civilization of Rome.
Cassius Dio ends his narrative of this episode with a description of
the final battle, which concludes]

“ . . . They contended for a long time, both parties being animated by
the same zeal and daring. Finally, though late in the day, the Romans
prevailed, having slain numbers in the battle, beside the wagons, or
in the wood: they also captured many alive. Still, not a few made
their escape and went on to prepare to fight a second time. Meanwhile,
however, Buduica fell sick and died. The Britons mourned her deeply
and gave her a costly burial; but, as they themselves were this time
really defeated, they scattered to their homes. — So far the history
of affairs in Britain.”

An Historical Narrative Originally Composed In Greek During The Reigns
Of Septimius Severus, Geta And Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus And
Alexander Severus And Now Presented In English Form By Herbert Baldwin
Foster.
Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10890]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10890/10890-h/10890-h.htm#a68_32

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida
preaching the message that no problem in the world can be
authentically addressed without first analyzing tangents caused by
Jewish perfidy, which has subverted and diminished every aspect of
human endeavor throughout history. Support for his work, which would
come in really handy right about now, is wholly derived from people
who can understand what he’s saying and know what it means.